To Combat Harassment, More Companies Should Try Bystander Training

Executive Summary

Training bystanders how to recognize, intervene and show empathy to targets of sexual assault has been found to be an effective way to increase awareness and disrupt assaults before they happen. Now, some companies are trying to use bystander training to combat sexual harassment as well. This strategy recognizes that, when it comes to workplace culture, everyone is responsible for creating it, every day, in every interaction. Bystanders don’t need to directly confront a harasser to have an impact; using humor to call out bad behavior (“What year is it? 1970?”) or even just changing the subject can help. Then, you can decide how to escalate the situation to a supervisor or HR.

As the wave of #MeToo stories have come to light over the past year, it’s become painfully clear that whatever organizations are doing to try to prevent sexual harassment isn’t working.

Ninety-eight percent of companies say they have sexual harassment policies. Many provide anti-sexual harassment training. Some perpetrators have been fired or fallen from grace. And yet more than four decades after the term “sexual harassment” was first coined, it remains a persistent and pervasive problem in virtually every sector and in every industry of the economy, our new Better Life Lab report finds. It wreaks financial, physical, and psychological damage, keeping women and other targets out of power or out of professions entirely. It also costs billions in lost productivity, wasted talent, public penalties, private settlements, and insurance costs.

So what does work? Or might?

Sadly, there’s very little evidence-based research on strategies to prevent or address sexual harassment. The best related research examines sexual assault on college campuses and in the military. That research shows that training bystanders how to recognize, intervene, and show empathy to targets of assault not only increases awareness and improves attitudes, but also encourages bystanders to disrupt assaults before they happen, and help survivors report and seek support after the fact.

Researchers and workplace experts are now exploring how to prevent sexual harassment in companies by translating that approach. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in its 2016 task force report encouraged employers to offer bystander training, for one. And New York City passed a law in May requiring all companies with more than 15 employees to begin providing bystander training by April 2019. It could prove a promising, long-term solution.

But culture change is hard — it can take anywhere from months to several years, experts say. It’s much easier to go for the annual, canned webinar training on sexual harassment that checks the legal-liability box. Yet culture change is exactly why bystander interventions could be powerful: the strategy recognizes that, when it comes to workplace culture, everyone is responsible for creating it, every day, in every interaction.

Jane Stapleton, co-director of the Prevention Innovations Research Center at the University of New Hampshire and an expert in bystander interventions, told me about an all-too-familiar scenario: Say there’s a lecherous guy in the office — someone who makes off-color jokes, watches porn at his cubicle, or hits on younger workers. Everyone knows who he is. But no one says anything. Co-workers may laugh uncomfortably at his jokes, or ignore them. Maybe they’ll warn a new employee to stay away from him. Maybe not. “Everybody’s watching, and nobody’s doing anything about it. So the message the perpetrator gets is, ‘My behavior is normal and natural,’” Stapleton said. “No one’s telling him, ‘I don’t think you should do that.’ Instead, they’re telling the new intern, ‘Don’t go into the copy room with him.’ It’s all about risk aversion — which we know through decades of research on rape prevention, does not stop perpetrators from perpetrating.”

When bystanders remain silent, and targets are the ones expected to shoulder responsibility for avoiding, fending off, or shrugging off offensive behavior, it normalizes sexual harassment and toxic or hostile work environments. So bystander intervention, which Stapleton and others are beginning to develop for workplaces, is designed to help everyone find their voice and give them tools to speak up.

It’s all about building a sense of community. “Bystander intervention is not about approaching women as victims or potential victims, or men as perpetrators, or potential perpetrators” she said. “Rather, it’s leveraging the people in the environment to set the tone for what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable behavior.”

At the most fundamental level, bystander interventions could begin — long before an incident of harassment — with workers having non-threatening, informal conversations in unstressed moments about how to treat each other, how they can help each other do their jobs or make their days better, and practice giving positive feedback. Normalizing talking about behavior and defining respectful behaviors everyone agrees on may make it easier for coworkers to see and give negative feedback if a worker later crosses a line, Fran Sepler, who for 30 years has worked as a consultant, trainer, and investigator on workplace harassment prevention, told me in an interview. “So when a co-worker tells an offensive joke, it’s easier to say, ‘Remember how we talked, and we all agreed about what’s OK to say at work? That’s not it.’”

In testimony before the EEOC, Sepler suggested organizations create “feedback rich” environments, where middle managers are trained to respond to complaints and issues in an emotionally intelligent way, and where people feel comfortable speaking up and listening, no matter the issue.

In campus settings, bystanders are trained to recognize when a sexual assault may be imminent and intervene by, for instance, disrupting the environment — turning the lights on at a party, or turning the music off — defusing the situation, with humor perhaps, distracting or interrupting a potential perpetrator, drawing a potential target away, or drawing others in.

But disrupting sexual harassment in the workplace requires a very different set of tools. “Too often people let things slide, concerned that if they get involved, it might affect their own career aspirations,” Alberto Rodríguez. supervising attorney for the New York City Commission on Human Rights, told me.

Because careers and reputations can be on the line, Sepler suggests considering a matrix of questions before acting: “Can I have an impact? Is it safe? What is the best strategy given the culture of the organization and my level of influence?”

Bystanders in the workplace can defuse harassing or offensive language or situations with humor, she said, or verbal or nonverbal expressions of disapproval. They can interrupt a situation by changing the subject, or inserting themselves into the situation. “If it’s the first time you hear someone say something offensive, you might try humor as a way of getting their attention, making a caustic remark, or saying, ‘What year is this? 1970?’ as a way of getting their attention,” Sepler said. Even so, she cautioned that bystanders must weigh whether the colleague has the reputation for being a jerk. Another option bystanders could consider is having a conversation after the fact, when tensions have cooled, laying out why the behavior was offensive.

For a harassing boss or someone who holds power over your career or livelihood, where direct confrontation could be riskier, defusion, distraction, or interruption are still possible tools for bystanders in the moment. And after the fact, bystanders can also seek out a supervisor or influencer, make a report, or help a target make a report.

At a minimum, bystanders can always show support to targets, who often feel isolated, humiliated, diminished, and alone after a harassing incident. “Going to someone and saying, ‘I saw how they were treating you. I didn’t like it. Is there anything I can do to help?’ Or, ‘It’s not your fault, let’s go talk with human resources.’ That might be all you can do,” Sepler said. “That’s not nothing.”

Brigid Schulte is a journalist, author of the New York Times bestselling Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One has the Time and director of the Better Life Lab at New America.